To Feel Stuff (12 page)

“No, I'm completely awake, Dad,” I said. Feeling suddenly angry, I remember throwing my hands up and drumming out a beat on the car's ceiling.

Since you've never seen my parents' house, I'll make you feel like you have, and that way, you'll be able to understand the logistics of everything I'm telling you. The house is Mediterranean and in one of the nicest neighborhoods in Palo Alto (I have to be honest). It's two stories with a clay tile roof, and there's a long balcony that runs the entire length of the second story. That balcony's divided by stucco pilasters, and behind the balcony there are four windows that are more wide than tall, with shutters on them. There are two picture windows on the front of the first floor that also have the same shutters. Last year my mom put two gigantic pots with miniature cypress trees on either side of the doorway, and the door itself is a little bit sunken inside of a big archway.

Our house is a corner property and so I saw my mom from four blocks away. She was standing out on the balcony, and I thought that she looked like one of those ancient women waiting for a ship to come in. But as soon as we pulled into the driveway, she disappeared into the house and reappeared on the front lawn, when I really was wishing she'd hang back for just a second.

“Chess!” she called through the closed car windows, and, El, her voice sounded the way it used to when she would call to me, underwater, from the edge of the pool. That's when I seriously started getting panicked about this mental distance issue that I was experiencing, since obviously it wasn't stopping before it hit my family.

My dad turned off the ignition and got out of the car. “He's doing fine, Olivia,” he said, and went to pop open the trunk.

My mom still had to see for herself, though, and so she opened the rear door near my feet and leaned in. “You're fine? How could that be?” she asked.

“I'm taking it like a champ, Mom,” I said. When I was looking at my mom I was thinking that I wanted her to hug me quickly and then let go before I felt the distance creeping between us.

“Nobody's going to fault you if you want to complain, Chess. You don't have to impress me with stoicism.”

I nodded.

Behind her, my dad was struggling to unfold the wheelchair, so my mom turned to help him. “I'll hold this part,” she told him, “and you push down on that bar there.” They started working together to get the wheelchair all set up, and for that brief, brief moment, their attention was off me. Then I heard, “We did it! Success through teamwork.”

Even though my parents live in separate bedrooms and have separate phone lines, they work well together and they know it. For about a second, in the early 'nineties when they were talking about divorce, they realized how good they were at living together and that it would be stupid to feel bitter about a failed romance. And they can even laugh about their situation now, which I think is great. Everyone should be able to laugh at themselves. My dad once bought my mom an inside-joke magnet for their “anniversary” that read, “Passion dies,” and it's still up on the fridge.

As my parents helped me into my wheelchair, my mom told me, “Your brothers are getting in from the city later today. They can't wait to see you. They were shocked you didn't call them right after the attack. Admittedly, we all were.”

“I wasn't trying to worry or insult you,” I said. “I just realized, what could you do from over here when I was over there?”

“What a question!” my dad exclaimed, and he gripped me on the shoulder. “For starters, we could have given our love and support.”

“Your father's exactly right. But I'm happy you're at least here with me now,” my mom said, and she kissed my hand.

 

The next afternoon at the Thanksgiving table, everyone else was seated before my mom pushed me in to the table. I was the “guest of honor.” But she hadn't calculated the room my extended legs needed, so my metal footrests slammed into the metal base of our dining table.

The scraping sound of the two like elements was really, truly horrible. I know it sent shivers up my spine, as I'm sure it did everyone else's. My whole body rebounded from the impact—my back hit my chair's pad, and my head flew into my mom's stomach.

My two older brothers, Seth and Mitchell (whom you never met), got up and tried to help.

“Mom,” yelled Mitchell, “pull him back out! Maybe you should get him away from the table.”

All the voices around me rattled in my ears like beans in a can. No, that doesn't even do it. They were plentiful like that, like a whole bunch of beans, but even louder. They were bombastic beans. I was hoping to quiet them, so I said, “Hey, I took a shitload of painkillers this morning. I barely feel a thing, everyone.”

“Chess, we've got guests here,” my dad reminded me. “Some with sensitive ears, so please.” And then, “Glad that didn't hurt too much, though. Olivia, you've got to be delicate with him right now.”

“I know. You're right, without a doubt.” My mom backed my wheelchair up with extreme cautiousness. “You're really fine?” she asked me.

“I'm fine, Mom. In that way.”

“That's unbelievable,” she said. My parents have always been my biggest cheerleaders, and I'm not being facetious. They were famous for being even louder than the real cheerleaders at my high school when I used to play lacrosse. My mom asked my dad, “Well, Chester, how are we going to do this?”

They decided to put me at the head of the table so I'd have enough legroom, but my mom was worried that I'd be sitting sideways.

“He can turn his head. It wouldn't be too hard to turn your head, would it, Chess?” my dad asked.

“Not at all,” I said. “I didn't get struck in the neck.”

Not to be a total dick, I kept my head turned in the direction of the table for the first five minutes of the meal. I was watching my little cousin Bella putting olives on her fingertips.

“Mommy, look. I'm sick. My fingers are sick and gross,” she said.

Bella's dad, my uncle Trevor, licked his finger and ran it across his right eyebrow, which is a nervous tic that he's never been able to shake, even though he knows he does it.

“Honey, when we have real sick people at a table, that's not a nice thing to say,” he told her.

My great-aunt Linda piped in, all insulted. “I'm not sick.”

“No one said you were, Aunt Linda.” Uncle Trevor was going crazy on his eyebrow. “Julia has warts on her hands, and she's very sensitive about them.” I knew he was covering, trying to draw attention away from my knees by targeting his wife instead.

“Do you really have to remind everyone, especially while we're at the table?” whispered my aunt Julia, getting really mad at him.

Honestly, I just didn't have patience for family drama, so I gave up, returned my head to its natural position, and watched our front yard turn purple as the night started to come down.

“Chess!” called Seth from the other side of the cornucopia centerpiece that my mom fills every year with orchids, which, by the way, I don't think are traditional Thanksgiving flora. “Tell us about the bashing o' the knees. Was it, without question, the most painful thing you've ever experienced?”

“This is Thanksgiving,” my dad said, trying to put the kibosh on.

“He's right,” nodded my mom. “If you're going to talk about it, you have to start your story with ‘I'm thankful for,' even if the rest of it ends badly.”

Mitchell tried to be funny by saying, “I'm thankful for the swipe to the knees, which hurt, but probably not as much as a swipe to the balls.” And then all the guys at the table made a big show out of clutching their hands to their nuts and groaning—even my cousin Paul, who told me once, when he was drunk, that he sometimes pays women to wear spike heels and step on his package.

Aunt Julia put her hands over Bella's ears and raised her eyebrows at Mitchell.

He said, “Aunt Julia, don't worry. She doesn't know what ‘balls' are. She thinks you dodge them at recess.”

“If nobody's disturbed by talking about the incident, then I suppose it's allowed,” my dad told the table.

“Thank you, Master,” my mom said, in some sort of Chinese-British-Jamaican slave-girl accent. At this point, I wanted so, so badly just to roll out of the room and wheel myself all the way back to Providence.

“If you want to know the truth,” I answered, and the whole table got quiet, “I barely remember it hurting at all. There was the first quick jolt, like a flash of lightning, but it felt more like a burst of energy, like energy being transferred, than a burst of pain. And then, after that, I have to say that I really felt nothing.”

“You must have instantly gone into shock,” my mom said, making her distressed face. “The only reason I can bear to hear this now is because I can look at you and see for myself that you're all in one piece.”

“Not shock, Mom,” I said. “A nurse told me it's officially called ‘the grace period.' There was almost a full hour where I was feeling fine, and I couldn't even understand why I was in the emergency room. I even told them I could get up and walk out I swear, I was pure grace.”

“Isn't it nice how the body automatically knows how to protect you from the worst?” my mom asked.

“The grace period, hmmm,” my dad mused. “That is a very nice function of the body.”

“We're elegant creatures,” said Uncle Trevor while licking his finger and wiping it across his eyebrow again, which I thought mostly cancelled out his personal elegance.

After dinner I was rolled into the living room for some holiday social time. I kept spacing out on one of the tapestries hanging on the wall near the fireplace—it shows these very fat peacocks that are wading through vines, but their stomachs hang so low that I've always thought that in real life, they probably couldn't move. So I just rested there in my wheelchair, backed against the picture window, and I listened to everyone talk without understanding them.

I was almost asleep when my mom's hands came down on my shoulders. “Chess? Chess?”

I'd forgotten where I was, and so what I said was “Elodie?”

“Who?” my mom asked.

“Oh, not Elodie,” I said.

“It's me. Are you too tired for a conversation?”

“What kind of conversation?”

“Your father and I want to have a talk with you. And it's late, I know. We hadn't planned on doing it tonight. The fact is, we weren't going to do it for months, but now neither of us can wait.”

“This sounds a little ominous, Mom,” I told her.

“It's not. I promise.”

When my mom had pushed me to the doorway of the study, my dad was already there, pitched forward all businesslike on the couch. “Come in. Come in,” he called, but my mom was already moving me toward him, so I said, “Looks like I'm heading toward you anyway.”

“Chess,” started my dad, “you've been a constant source of pride for us. I don't think we could express what a pleasure it's been to watch you grow into the young man that you've become.”

“I still feel that this is ominous, Mom,” I said.

“You have nothing to worry about. Just listen to your dad.”

“Chess, you have absolutely nothing to worry about.” My dad gave me a weird grin like he was suspicious of me for being suspicious of him. “This isn't a bait and switch. I'm speaking to you straightforwardly. Everything I'm saying is true.”

“Okay.”

“Really, Chess. It is true. You've never been so wary of us before,” my mom said.

“You're right,” I agreed.

“Then I'll go on,” my dad told me, clasping his hands. “As I was saying, your mother and I feel that you've become a very fine man. And even though the measure of a man can't be reduced to dollars and cents, we have the tradition, as you are aware, of making gifts to our sons upon graduation.”

Now I relaxed a little because my brain was clicking and saying, “Ohhhhhhh. Oh.”

“Seth received his boat, and Mitchell his year traveling through Europe.”

I nodded, and just hoped they weren't going to tell me that they'd bought me a platinum wheelchair.

“And we were going to wait to give you your gift in May, except when we found out your knees were bashed by that vandal—” My dad couldn't even finish.

“It's such a tragic thing to have happen in your senior year, Chess, and we're so proud of the way you're carrying yourself. Look at you,” my mom said, gesturing toward me with this look of awe like I was juggling grenades instead of just sitting there like a complete invalid.

My dad was reaching into his inside jacket pocket and pulling out some kind of brochure. “So we wanted to present you with a token of our admiration during this trip home. Even though the gift isn't finished yet.”

“Isn't finished?” I asked.

“We've put the down payment on a brand-new townhouse.”

I absorbed this news for ten seconds, but I don't think it was really affecting me the way that they wanted it to. How could I think ahead to a house that I would live in after graduation when I had only just started living a life of the moment? My mind couldn't even get past the next five minutes, and in those next five minutes all I knew was that I had to talk to you. I felt that you were living on the same scale of time, and I needed someone who made sense right then, right in that frame. I asked my parents, “Can I be excused to go make a phone call?”

They weren't too happy about the request, but they rolled me to the phone anyway. I think they were scared to deny me anything. I called the infirmary, which I've never told you before because you didn't answer. That was all I wanted that night, though, so you know now—to get ahold of you.

Paxil CR: Get back to being you